In 2005, we moved out of Bristol and put our two boys, Sam and Ted, in a lovely small village school. We are now just outside the city boundary, near the football stadium and on the way to the airport. There are golf courses in every direction, and down the road lies an old estate owned by the council and used for outdoor festivals and dog walking. So it isn't really countryside at all. It's dogland.

Everybody here has dogs. Liz and Paul on our left have a huge black labrador, Dunstan. Robert and Ursula on our right used to have two golden retrievers. Outside the village store are steel bars that I thought were bike racks, but really they are used for tying up dogs. Just up the road from the vet is a little shop selling Cash's name tapes and knitting patterns. The lady behind the counter gives a good stroke and throat scratch – you are practically not allowed in there without a dog.

And then there are the walkers. Every morning and every evening they troop past our door on their way to the old estate. Labradors, beagles, collies, pugs, alsations, terriers, greyhounds … Dogs, dogs, dogs.

Even the school has a dog. In a frame in the hall there are photographs of all the staff: a dozen smiling men and women, and a chocolate labrador called Rafi. This is no act of whimsy. Rafi, a slender, mild-mannered überdog, is a professional with a Pets As Therapy accreditation and a clutch of certificates. He is trained to jump through hoops and tidy toys into a chest. He only pees and poos on demand. He also puts the hours in, doing a full working day in the school office with his squashed plastic chicken.

Our older son, Sam, was instantly smitten by Rafi. And the headmistress was very kind and let Sam walk the dog and give him treats. When things were rough – and school wasn't easy for Sam – he would go and give Rafi a cuddle. Inevitably, he started hankering after a dog of his own.

The head gave me newspaper cuttings on the Pets As Therapy charity. She said: "Sam really likes Rafi."

Later, one of Sam's teachers said: "A dog could really do Sam good."

I said vaguely that we were thinking about it.

A few days later, the headmistress said: "I know you've been thinking about getting a dog. I'll keep an eye out." Then one morning: "I've found you a dog. Here are the details."

That afternoon: "Have you phoned yet?"

I duly drove down to Plymouth to collect Hope, a one-year-old chocolate labrador bitch and a half sister of Rafi's mum. Hope had had an unhappy puppyhood. When she was tiny, there'd been some nasty scrambling in the litter and her right ear was badly ripped.

It had been stitched back on, but got infected. Five more operations followed. The poor creature had spent months with one of those awful dog lampshades round her head. Now the breeder didn't feel she could sell her. We could have Hope free, as long as we agreed not to breed from her. A bargain?

Well, sort of …

When I arrived at the breeder's farm, there was a sea of brown and black dogs. And, standing alone in a separate enclosure was one quite sturdy brown dog with its paws splayed out slightly like a ballet dancer. This was Hope. And it was only later – for at that point I couldn't tell labradors apart – that I realised what a truly beautiful dog she really was. She had golden eyes and a face like a seal, and lovely – if slightly wonky – ears that were the texture of Jus-Rol pastry.

Soon I was zipping down the motorway listening to the radio and catching jets of dog fug that wafted out from the back of the car. This was the first thing I discovered about dogs: they really smell. With dogs it's an actively emitted odour – as if they possess special smell glands with little motors working away overtime. By the end of our two-hour journey, the car had been thoroughly dogified.

It wasn't long, of course, before the house went the same way. And in other ways too, Hope settled in quickly. We reinforced the fencing round the garden, bought her her own squashed plastic chicken and a huge crate that took up a third of our tiny kitchen. She made friends with Dunstan next door. She also played with our guineapigs, Snuffles and Nibbles, nudging them delicately with her nose.

For Hope was a very gentle dog. She had a nice temperament and almost never barked. Jeremy, my husband, liked the fact that a dog in the family made long country walks not merely a private indulgence but a domestic necessity. Sam and Ted adored her, and at night, when they were meant to be in bed, they would creep downstairs and crawl into her crate and nestle beside her. The boys also crept in for a cuddle if they were upset. That is the great thing about a dog: however beastly and unreasonable your parents are, the dog will always be on your side.

And me? Did I love her? In theory. In a Prince Charles "whatever love means" way. Certainly, I should have loved her. How could I not love her with her golden eyes and her terrible farts? How could I have such a terrible failure of heart?

Well, I'm afraid, very easily. Hope doubled my housework. She chewed up my goggles and pulled the tassels off my sandals. Her tail invariably found any fine china on the coffee table and whacked it to the ground. I could have bought a nice new coat each year on the vet's bills. And – no doubt my poor husbandry was to blame – but Hope really was no Rafi. She didn't tidy toys into boxes and she certainly didn't wait to be relieved – she always seemed to shit in the middle of other people's lawns.

It was the neediness that really got to me. When I was working in my study, she would sit at the bottom of the stairs waiting. Every time I came down for a cup of tea she would look up at me pleadingly. "A walk?"

She'd follow me into the kitchen. "That tenderloin of pork?" In the evening I'd slump down in front of the TV. She would sit facing me, watching me watch television. "A tummy rub?"

I was astonished to discover what other owners were prepared to do for their dogs. Late one evening, when I was putting the bins out, I met an old man walking a little white bottle brush of a dog that yelped and writhed at the end of the lead. Christine was a traumatised rescue dog, so nervous of people and other dogs that she could only be walked at dead of night or at dawn. The old man looked very tired – he and his wife were caring for Christine in shifts.

Some people, I also learned, went to enormous lengths over dog food. One owner I met regularly stank out her kitchen baking her own dog biscuits out of chopped-up offal. And in the old estate, I met a woman who clearly thought Hope wasn't up to snuff and recommended that I grate her up enormous piles of raw vegetables every day. The woman also swore by an obscure pet-food supplement only found in a shop far far away under a flyover on the other side of Bristol. Her last dog, she announced proudly, had lived to 21.

I looked at Hope: 21 years of old golden eyes? I bit my lip.

But we weren't to make 21. Nothing like it.

On a bleak February morning I took Hope to the vet's with what I thought was just a chest infection. It turned out to be a secondary cancer of the lungs.

When the vet broke the news, I found myself saying: "She's only a dog. Can't you just keep her going till the holidays?"

He said: "You'll be lucky if she makes it to the weekend."

"Wednesday then?"

He nodded.

I felt a need for ritual. On Tuesday evening, I took Hope next door on a valedictory visit to Dunstan, and he nosed at her gently – in just the way that she always did with the guineapigs. The following afternoon, Sam and Ted and I went to the vet.

In the waiting room, Ted had a fit of the collywobbles and said Hope didn't need to die and she was "OK really". When I went to the bathroom I came back to find him out in the car park, trying to lift her back into the boot.

Eventually he calmed down and we went into the consulting room. As the vet prepared the needle, those trusting golden eyes looked up at us.

After the injection, she gave one horrible quiver and then collapsed. Blood from her diseased lungs pooled on the floor. The vet ushered us out lickety-split.

The following day both boys were a little subdued, and poor Ted found his eyes welling up in maths. I binned the ghastly squashed chicken and folded up the enormous crate. There was, I'm very sorry to report, a new lightness to my step. I tried to analyse my feelings: a little bit of sorrow, but mainly relief. Relief tinged with anger and astonishment at the colossal vet's bill.

The condolence cards – some of them decorated with dogs – flooded in. The boys had left the primary school now, but the headmistress still sent us a note offering to lend us Rafi whenever we needed to walk a dog. Neighbours stopped me in the street. They'd say "You must be devastated" or "It'll take you weeks to get over it … " And I would mumble something noncommittal and feel terrible. Why hadn't we bonded? What was wrong with me?

We debated whether to replace Hope. To help us decide, we borrowed Alfie, a gritty little Parson Russell terrier belonging to friends who were off on holiday. Alfie doesn't have golden eyes. He is not gentle. On arrival he circled round and round the guineapig hutch in a not nice way.

A few days later, something terrible happened. I heard a scream from the garden and looked out of the window. Oh, no. Teddy, with tears streaming down his face, was holding the corpse of Snuffles à la the last act of King Lear. He had opened the guineapig hutch with Alfie nearby. In a flash, the dog had dived in, grabbed Snuffles in his jaws and …

We buried Snuffles in the front flowerbed. Guineapigs don't quite merit letters of condolence, but the neighbours were sympathetic and volunteered to take in the other guineapig until Alfie's owners returned. I said gallantly: "Don't worry. Nibbles will be fine. It can't happen twice."

It did. A few days later, one of Sam's friends left the back gate open and Alfie seized the opportunity. This time there was no screaming. The first I heard was a roar of anger from Sam. A second later, Alfie hurtled into the study and dived under my desk.

We held the funeral in the front garden. It was harder this time. To lose two guineapigs really did show carelessness, and Nibbles was especially beloved on account of his ruffles. But yet again, with the grief came relief. No more hutch cleaning. No more droppings on the sofa.

And now we have no pets. No pets at all!

We've given up on the idea of getting another dog and something has subtly changed in our family. Maybe it was the surfeit of nasty deaths. Or perhaps it's just adolescence kicking in, for Sam is now 14 and his love of animals has become less urgent. I've asked if he'd like a proper teenage-type pet. Something a bit gothic: a rat? He's not bothered.

And me? Well, the guilt lives on. Now I'm almost creepily interested in other people's dogs. I'll cross the road to stroke even a one-legged Irish elkhound. And I'm always volunteering to take Dunstan out. I follow the fluctuations in his health (he's getting on) religiously, and not just because I like Liz and Paul.

But if I am ever tempted to get another dog, I only have to look out of my bedroom window.

Until very recently, my other neighbours, Robert and Ursula, were the classic freed-up sixtysomething couple: their children had left home, their dogs were dead. Last year, they went on a long, adventurous holiday to New Zealand. They've also carried out extensive work on their beautiful back garden, and got in a company to recondition the back lawn and turn it into a perfect, moss-free billiard table of green.

But then Robert got the bug again. He bought a puppy – a lovely golden retriever. Now the plants get chewed up and the billiard table grass is spotted with burn marks. At the crack of dawn I can see him outside in the back garden, shoulders hunched against the cold. He is watching the puppy as she snuffles around, taking her time to choose which new bit of lawn to ruin.